[Nick529]

So it was my 6 year old sisters birthday in may and my brother and I decided to buy her an older laptop so she could play her internet games(nick.com and farmville on my mom's facebook account). It was about midnight when i found a 70 dollar laptop on ebay and bought it. I didn't exactly consider the specs as I just wanted to get the laptop and move on. It turns out we bought a Pentium 3 laptop with virtually no ram and a corrupt hard drive.

Now my goal is to take the 3 old systems I have and just get something working that will browse the internet.

Laptop (won't boot to OS)(will run Linux from my usb drive though)
Asus Tangent
Pentium 3 MHz
64 or 128 MB ram
CD drive
hard drive should be clear after I removed Slax and tried unsuccessfully to put on Ubuntu, then puppy Linux, then damn small Linux( I got mac pup, a distribution of puppy Linux, to work off my flash drive)

My old P4 computer(best hope to get working)(also wont boot OS)
Pentium 4 at somewhere between 2-2.8Ghz
old graphics card
256 MB ram
2 fairly large hard drives(been a while since I booted into bios)
dvd drive
Ubuntu OS( also had a severely corrupted windows xp)

old computer my brother got for free from school
Celeron at 900 MHz
windows 98
64 mb of ram
no graphics card

Now because i think my best chance of getting one of these to work at a reasonable speed is with my old P4, i'll describe in detail it's problems. It worked fine with Ubuntu for a good 2 or 3 months and then it would just freeze before it even got to the loading screen. Eventually cleared the hard drive, now it's been about a year and I just looked into repairing it for my sister, When I turned it on I couldn't get to the bios. Just gave a loud beeping sound, POST I believe it's called. Anyway I have opened the thing up for now and cleaned it up a bit. i will due some troubleshooting tomorrow when it isn't so late and see what more I can find out. I have a lot more info to say but I don't want to type you guys a book so i'll stop this night's post soon.

I'm just hoping to get some advice throughout this project by consulting with the experts at OCN

. Well tomorrow I'll update this thread with pics and exact specs and as a final note, I don't have a lot of money and I am saving up for several things so the cheapest fix is welcome.

 

[Hydraulic]

Welcome to ocn.
Do some research on the manufactures site. that beeping (if its in bursts) can be a code to allow you to possibly find out what is up with the mobo(if thats the problem). Usually if they do that it will be in bursts of three or four beeps that might be long long short long. that kind of thing.

 

[Kryton]

Yes, check out what the beep codes could mean, that may help.

One common reason for the beeps when booting is a bad stick of RAM. However a good cleaning of the machine and a simple removal and reinstall of the RAM may fix this. Be sure to go ahead and redo your CPU's TIM (Thermal heatsink grease) since old TIM tends to dry out and not provide good heat transfer.
There are many things that can cause problems if a machine has sat for awhile and some simple maintenance with a good cleaning can fix these problems.

 

[Nick529]

Well i'm working on it right now, I found out the motherboard is a SOYO SY-P4VGA. I tried their site but google chrome says the webpage is unavailable. I also asked my aunt(who gave me the computer) and she said it is a intel celeron running at 2.8 ghz. I took a look at the heat sink and it appears to be loose, could this cause the cpu to overheat and shut down so quickly. I don't feel like dragging up my monitor tonight so I'll turn it on tomorrow. I am also posting a few pictures in like 10 minutes.

 

[Nick529]

The computer opened up, sorry for bad picture quality. I can't find my camera so I used the camera on my netbook.

 

[Nick529]

Been busy the past 2 days, have not had a chance to start it yet.

 

[CrazzyRussian]

I have a compaq presario 3045us laptop I was thinking of getting rid of (selling it, not throwing it away). It has 512 mb of ddr sdram (2 x 256mb), a socket 478 pentium 4 clocked at 2.4 Ghz (not OC'd), and an IDE 2.5" 60 Gb harddrive uploaded with windows 7 ULTIMATE (activated). PM me if you need any of these parts or want the laptop. It works without a sweat (although it has some lag but for a 7 year old computer running windows 7 ultimate not bad)

Also, the beeping noise can be a CMOS error which means replace the small battery, but if you cant even enter the bios then it might be a ram error something with the CPU.